Award-Winning Poet at UPB

Award-winning poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil will read from her works on Nov. 11 at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. She will read poetry starting at noon in the Mukaiyama University Room of the Frame-Westerberg Commons. The reading is free and open to the public. A reception will follow. The event is part of the university’s annual Spectrum Series.

Nezhukumatathil is the author of “At the Drive-In Volcano,” which includes a plea to students not to be afraid of her long and foreign name. In another poem, she bathes in a magical garden in India by the light of luminescent worms while keeping an ear out for blue lizards falling in the water.

Reviewers often refer to the humor and charm of her poems. Publisher’s Weekly wrote of her first collection, “Miracle Fruit,” that “the Miracle Fruit of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s debut comes through in light bursts of clean sensuality and joy.”

Her poems have been published in a dozen publications, including “Language for a New Century”; “Creative Writing”: “Four Genres in Brief”; and “Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, God, War, Art, Sex, Death, Madness, and Everything Else.”

She is currently writing nature essays and a third collection of poems.

An associate professor of English at the State University of New York-Fredonia, Nezhukumatathil received the SUNY’s Drescher Award and SUNY-wide Chancellor's Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2006 and SUNY-Fredonia's Hagan Scholar in 2005.

She earned a bachelor's degree in English and a master of fine arts degree in poetry and creative nonfiction from Ohio State University. She also attended Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow.

She lives in western New York with her husband, son and miniature dachsund.